Unix reigns in European HPC

Edinburgh 11 Oct 99 MPP is still the most wideley used HPC architecture in Europe. Unix is used by almost everyone (95 percent) and 97 percent of the HPC users expect to use it at the same level, or even more in three years time. These conclusions can be drawn from a survey conducted by Dr. Rob Baxter for Direct, a group of European research supercomputer centres. The Direct survey, amongst 190 supercomputer centre users, also concludes that NT is no longer gaining ground in the HPC arena. In three year's time, 23 percent of the respondents expected to use the NT operating system less than today. Only 41 percent is using it today. The survey also shows that a majority is using clusters of workstations. Vector-SMP is the third widely used architecture with 45 percent.

Dr. Rob Baxter from EPCC conducted the survey between November 1998 and May 1999. An electronic questionnaire was used in an attempt to determine which of the facilities and services provided by HPC centres are most relevant to their users. A total of 190 responses were received, considered a reasonable sample size by Baxter.

The HPC centres users are mainly academic researchers. 73% of the respondents classed themselves as "academic researchers", 19% as "computing consultants" and 8% as "industrial researchers". Application areas were dominated by computing and physical sciences, although there was a good deal of representatives from the applied science disciplines of engineering, computational fluid dynamics, earth sciences and materials.

MPP, clusters of workstations and vector-SMP are the important HPC computational engines. The other architectures are of much less importance as the following table, taken from the report, shows.

Architecture Used by

Massively Parallel Processor 81%

Clusters of workstations/PCs 61%

Vector-SMP 45%

RISC-SMP 27%

ccNUMA 23%

SIMD 14%

SMP Cluster 7%

Custom-built 3%

The percentages of respondents having used HPC architecture x.

Where are we going with HPC? Concerning the operating system, NT is not breaking through, as many expected. Unix is still very dominant, and users do not expect a decline. Unfortunately, the questionnaire did not separate Linux from other Unixes, hence, we do not know whether the expected decrease of NT is due to the rising popularity of Linux.

Fortran is still the language of choice for computational problems. The newer dialects, Fortran 90/95 are gaining on Fortran 77. HPF is only used by 28 percent of the respondents and not much growth is expected in the next three years.

As a parallel programming paradigm, PVM is slowly loosing ground. On the other hand, more than sixty percent expect to use more MPI-2 in three years time. The following table summarises the results on current and expected technology use.

Technology Use Expected use in 3 years time

now? less same more:

Windows/NT 41% 23% 44% 33%

Unix 95% 4% 71% 26%

C 65% 11% 65% 24%

C++ 3 6% 12% 41% 47%

Java 23% 8% 39% 53%

Fortran77 73% 51% 42% 7%

Fortran90/95 62% 9% 36% 55%

HPF 28% 17% 58% 25%

OpenMP 14% 11% 58% 31%

PVM 33% 35% 57% 7%

MPI 31% 16% 48% 36%

MPI-2 26% 6% 30% 63%

CORBA 12% 11% 69% 19%

Software packages 62% 4% 66% 30%

Libraries 69% 3% 64% 33%

Visualisation 58% 3% 49% 48%

Current technology use and patterns of change over three years.

As expected, computational scientists feel they are limited by the speed of current systems. They want high-end, large memory systems. According to Baxter, there is a feeling that these systems are better managed in centralised facilities. People expect high-quality system support and expertise.

Baxter concludes that the results of the survey can be summarised with: "scientific users of high-performance computing prefer central well-managed top-end systems with high-quality tools and support."

The report can be down-loaded from the Direct Web site.

Ad Emmen

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